Culture

Expats in Wonderland

Whether hosting a Paris bash for Stravinsky’s latest ballet, visiting the Cole Porters in Venice, or summering with Picasso on the Riviera, Gerald and Sara Murphy brought their incandescent American energy, passion for art, and substantial fortunes to the playgrounds of 1920s Europe. As a new exhibition focuses on the couple, and Gerald’s painting, John Richardson explores the shadows of their gorgeous life, immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

The epitome of glamorous expatriate life in Paris and on the Riviera in the 1920s, Gerald and Sara Murphy have been exceptionally fortunate in their chroniclers. Calvin Tomkins, who rescued them from virtual oblivion in a 1962 breakthrough profile in The New Yorker, which became the 1971 book Living Well Is the Best Revenge, was followed in 1982 by their daughter, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, with a memoir, Sara & Gerald. In 1998, Amanda Vaill published her extremely perceptive biography, Everybody Was So Young. And now we have a new exhibition with a fascinating catalogue devoted to the Murphys, organized by Deborah Rothschild. It opens at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on July 8. Rothschild’s lengthy preface dazzles, as do the other refreshingly readable essays.

Both Gerald and Sara came of upwardly mobile families and were heirs to considerable fortunes. Gerald’s enterprising father had realized that automobiles were taking over from horse-drawn vehicles and switched from making saddles to manufacturing luggage, briefcases, and other luxury goods for his Vuittonian store, Mark Cross. Gerald started out as a gifted amateur, but Paris transformed him into one of America’s most significant modernist painters of the 20s.

Sara (née Wiborg) had a no less self-made father. The son of a Norwegian deckhand, he started life as a newsboy and worked his way up from selling printer’s ink to co-owning Ault and Wiborg, whose inks were celebrated for their quality, as witness Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographic poster for the company. Francis Wiborg married way above himself. Adeline Sherman was the well-endowed niece of the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and Senator John Sherman. She bore Wiborg three daughters: Sara—the eldest and prettiest—Hoytie, and Olga. Wiborg struck out on his own. Instead of an ornate summerhouse in staid Newport, he bought 600 acres in the as yet undiscovered village of East Hampton and built a mansion called the Dunes.

Like one of Edith Wharton’s pushy matriarchs, Adeline took her daughters to London to be presented at King Edward VII’s court. In subsequent seasons they were invited to innumerable balls so that they might meet “the right people” and maybe marry one of them. In 1911, Violet, Duchess of Rutland—an unconventional woman who painted and sculpted and had lovers—took the girls up and had them to stay at Belvoir, the family’s castellated seat. The duchess’s fondness for wearing ropes of pearls down her back made such an impression on Sara that she adopted the habit and later would wear pearls even to the beach, as drawings of her by Picasso confirm. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description, “Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders, and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun.” The climax of the Wiborgs’ 1913 season was Adeline’s much-vaunted “Vegetable Ball” at the Ritz, where Olga and Prince Colonna, followed by a footman in blackface trundling a wheelbarrow around the ballroom, handed out vegetables as favors. The “ragtime potato race” was won by Violet Rutland’s glamorous daughter, soon to win fame as Lady Diana Cooper.

The Wiborgs’ return to New York was a hideous anticlimax. The ultra-respectable, socially prominent Adeline was caught bringing in $5,000 worth of undeclared frocks and jewelry, and the tabloids made the most of it. So mortifying was the scandal that she and the girls fled back to England and then to the Far East. Gerald, who had fallen in love with Sara, was not allowed to accompany them. Once they were back in New York, Sara, who had known Gerald since he was 16, came to realize that she was in love with him as well. They both wanted to be free spirits—ideally painters—although at that point neither had any inkling of modernism, to judge by their stuffy choice of William James Jr., the son of the great psychologist, to do Sara’s portrait in 1921. Both sets of parents opposed their marriage, but the lovers stood firm and were wed on December 30, 1915. They adored each other and were perfect soulmates, sharing a fantasy that life could be lived as if it were a work of art.

To escape the commercialism and the restrictions imposed by their families, not to mention Prohibition (Gerald fancied himself a connoisseur of sherry and champagne), the Murphys, accompanied by their children and a nanny, left New York in June 1921. They planned to spend the summer in England and then move on to Paris for a few weeks, but could not tear themselves away from the French capital. They rented an apartment and stayed on and on.

Soon after arriving in Paris, Gerald had an epiphany that would change his life. His eye had been caught by a painting by Picasso in the window of Paul Rosenberg’s gallery. Inside, he was overwhelmed by other Picassos and works of Georges Braque and Juan Gris, which he was seeing for the first time. “There was,” he wrote later, “a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit.” He was “astounded.” He told Sara, “That’s the kind of painting that I would like to do.” She, too, saw the light, so off they went to study under Natalia Goncharova, a Russian modernist, who had designed the sets for Le Coq d’Or, performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Goncharova and her lover, Mikhail Larionov, would not allow their students to paint anything representational—“no apple on a dish,” Sara later remembered.

Impressed by Gerald’s talent, Goncharova recommended him to Diaghilev, who needed the company’s tour-battered backdrops restored. The Murphys were prepared to work for free, provided they could attend rehearsals and meet Diaghilev’s stars, who included Léonide Massine and Lydia Sokolova. Scene painting was arduous. They had to spread the canvas flats on the floor and paint away with soft brushes at the ends of broom handles, then climb 30-foot ladders to judge the effect. The artists who had created the sets—Braque and André Derain as well as Picasso—would come and check up on them. On one of these occasions, Picasso’s roving eye fell on Sara. As Calvin Tomkins writes, “Americans seemed to fascinate Picasso He invited the Murphys to his apartment, on the Rue de la Boëtie … in every room [there] were pictures in various stages of completion.” They would soon become close friends.

Sara’s life in Paris was complicated by the presence of her painfully snobbish sister, Hoytie, the recipient of a lifetime tenancy of an attractive apartment for her ambulance work during World War I. Hoytie was a voracious “lipstick lesbian” and also an aggressive drunk. Raymond Radiguet would pillory her as Hester Wayne, the intellectually pretentious American heiress in Count d’Orgel’s Ball, his roman à clef about étienne de Beaumont, the waspish art patron who terrorized les gens chic by excluding a chosen few of them from his lavish costume balls. Dismayed to find her sister painting scenery in working-class Belleville, Hoytie accused her and Gerald of wasting their time. However, she would subsequently buy some superb Picassos. Years later, I went to dine with her, hoping to see the paintings, but they had all been sold. The food was excellent, but listening to a raucous, anti-Semitic rant from a bitter old alcoholic was too high a price to pay.

Besides putting the Murphys in touch with Picasso and Fernand Léger, Gerald’s work for the theater enabled him, as it had Picasso, to visualize things monumentally: “I seemed to see in miniature detail, but in a giant scale.” As a token of his new passion, Gerald kept a big industrial ball bearing on his piano: an abstract sculpture, people thought. Within a year, he had graduated from an unfocused dilettante (at Harvard he had studied landscape architecture) into an accomplished artist with an eye-catching, hard-edge style inspired by Amédée Ozenfant and, above all, Léger, whose machine aesthetic had become his guiding light. Gerald’s still life of a razor the size of a mallet (1924) impressed Picasso and inspired Léger to hail him as “the only American painter in Paris.” Five years later, however, after a dazzling series of huge compositions—only seven of which have survived—Gerald packed away his brushes, rolled up his canvases, and forgot that he had ever been a painter. He felt that his work was second-rate and that “the world is filled with second-rate painting.”

That was not the real reason. For all their precision and intricacy, most of the mechanisms in these great paintings contain a functional flaw. This stands for what Gerald regarded as his inherent “defect”: the homosexuality that overshadowed his life. These paintings are thus symbolic portraits of the artist as a closet case. Rothschild’s catalogue includes an intriguing essay by the art historian Kenneth E. Silver, entitled “The Murphy Closet and the Murphy Bed,” in which he discusses Gerald’s shame over his condition, for which he made self-lacerating mea culpas to Sara. Silver ends by hailing him for his “gorgeous, agonized, brilliant, sad, and triumphant life.” True, but Gerald had one unattractive failing: his polymorphous narcissism, which seems to have been a cover for his bitterness and guilt. Gerald’s closet was chockablock with costumes—Mexican, cowboy, Apache, Tyrolean, safari, gondolier, and, it was rumored, drag. So obsessive was he about the cut of his suits that he refused to put anything in his pockets that might make a bulge. He kept his keys and wallet in a satchel made of striped Japanese fabric or a leather pouch. Scott Fitzgerald, who based Dick Diver, the hero of Tender Is the Night, on Gerald, mocked him: “You go to all that trouble with buckles and straps … because you’re a masochist.”

Fitzgerald, who enjoyed putting friends’ sexual orientation to the test, mischievously introduced Gerald to a suitable young Chilean, Eduardo Velasquez, whose hopes that psychoanalysis might cure him of homosexuality had seemingly been dashed. Gerald later tried through Fitzgerald to return the love token—his mother’s cross—that Velasquez had given him. Unbeknownst to Gerald, Velasquez had become involved in one of the few British scandals to have been hushed up. He had had an affair with a member of the royal family and had been secretly expelled from the country.

Deborah Rothschild has also identified a hitherto unknown buddy, Richard Cowan, an attractive, openly gay landscape gardener from Boston, whose diary has recently come to light. To her credit, Sara got on well with him. Until he committed suicide in 1939, for no apparent reason, Cowan was a frequent companion—not least on Gerald’s yachts, where, as photographs by Man Ray reveal, the thong took precedence over the bathing suit. Gerald then fell for another handsome young man, Alan Jarvis, a Canadian art historian, who would become the director of the National Gallery of Canada. Jarvis was “the soul mate [Gerald] had been searching for … since he was fifteen.” Like Gerald, he abhorred his orientation, and like Velasquez, had been at pains to find a cure for it. “No feathers” (a euphemism for flamboyant gayness), Sara once said approvingly of Jarvis. However, she came to resent him, possibly because he regarded Gerald as “the ideal father he had never had.” The relationship was more insidious for being so parental.

In June 1923, the Murphys made a great splash in Paris with a social bloodbath of a party after the first night of Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces. Gerald had helped paint the sets and wanted to honor everyone involved, as well as old friends from America and the new friends they had made in Paris—the Picassos, the Beaumonts, the Légers, the José María Serts, Tristan Tzara, Raymond Radiguet, Jean Cocteau and his gang of young composers, the stars of the Ballets Russes, and many more.

Originally the Murphys wanted to hold the party at the Cirque Médrano, where the big draw was the Fratellini Brothers—a celebrated trio of clowns whom Picasso was rumored to be painting—but the manager told Gerald that his circus “was not yet an American colony.” Instead, Sara settled on a large barge on the Seine. Since it was a Sunday, the florists were closed, so she decorated the banquet tables with pyramids of toys—fire engines, cars, animals, dolls, clowns—that she had found in a Montparnasse bazaar. Picasso was thrilled and re-arranged the toys into a traffic pileup topped by a cow on a fireman’s ladder. He may well have had them in mind 30 years later when he conjured a monkey’s head out of his son’s toy motorcars.

In the annals of social history, the Murphys’ party rates almost as high as Picasso’s banquet for the primitive painter “Le Douanier” Rousseau in 1908. Stravinsky had fun switching the place cards, Goncharova read palms, the great pianist Marcelle Meyer played Scarlatti, and, as usual, Cocteau tried to steal the show—refusing to go on board for fear of seasickness, then rushing around with a lantern, dressed up as the captain, proclaiming, “On coule” (We’re sinking). As dawn broke, Boris Kochno (Diaghilev’s secretary) and Ernest Ansermet (the conductor) took down Sara’s gigantic laurel wreath, inscribed les noces—hommages, and held it like a hoop for Stravinsky to jump through. Picasso found the exhilaration generated by the Americans a great relief after the protocol, intrigue, and 18th-century formality that were de rigueur at Beaumont’s balls.

After the Les Noces party, everyone left for the summer. The previous year, the Murphys had spent two weeks at Antibes with the Cole Porters, who had rented the Château de la Garoupe, next to the Hôtel du Cap, with Eden Roc at the tip of Cap d’Antibes. This time they persuaded Antoine Sella, the proprietor of the hotel, who had always closed the place from May to September, to keep a few rooms open. The Murphys asked Picasso to join them, and to their delight he accepted and brought along his Russian wife, Olga, and two-year-old son, Paulo. They were amazed to find that they had launched a fashion that would revolutionize the world’s concept not only of the French Riviera but also of the Mediterranean, as the planet’s most popular playground. As Picasso later remarked, looking over the throng of sunbathers on the beach at La Garoupe—which Gerald had been the first to clear of seaweed—he and the Murphys had a lot to answer for.

The only other people at the hotel were a Chinese diplomat and his family. However, a friend of Picasso’s was staying next door, the renowned Scottish artist J. D. Fergusson, whose wife—a teacher of modern dance—had talked Sella into lending her three empty cottages for her pupils in return for their giving dance recitals on the terrace outside the hotel. This troupe of some 20 dancers inspired Picasso’s drawings of girls on the beach. “All of them swam divinely,” Picasso told a friend, “but couldn’t dance at all.”

Picasso had also arranged for his elderly mother, Do&ntildea Maria, to join them. This shy, uneducated Andalusian widow, who did not give a damn for appearances, endeared herself to the Murphys and their friends rather more than Picasso’s ballerina wife did. To facilitate conversation, Do&ntildea Maria tried to teach the Murphys Spanish—to no avail.

In the course of the summer, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas joined them at the Hôtel du Cap. Their visit had been preceded by a letter from Gertrude, which Picasso brought down to the beach in fits of laughter to show the Murphys. Gertrude coveted a painting she had seen at Rosenberg’s gallery and proposed exchanging Picasso’s famous portrait of her for it. Would he mind? The Murphys were scandalized. “Yes,” Picasso said, “but I love her so much.” “[Gertrude] and Picasso were phenomenal together,” Gerald said. “Each stimulated the other to such an extent that everyone felt recharged witnessing it.”

Picnics on the beach, boat trips to the islands, even a spoof beauty pageant in bathing suits, organized by the Beaumonts, enlivened this historic summer. The relaxed atmosphere that the Murphys generated is best caught in a series of photographs that the Beaumonts commissioned to commemorate a fancy-dress party that they and the Murphys organized on the beach at La Garoupe. étienne, in an exotic headdress, towers over the group; Olga, in a tutu and turban, poses on her points; Picasso, wearing a fedora, stands over his mother, who is all in black; Sara’s pearls dangle down her back.

Early in August, the Murphys went to Venice for a two-week stay with the Cole Porters, who had taken the magnificent Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal for the summer. Gerald had work to do. Rolf de Maré, the impresario of the avant-garde Swedish Ballet, had commissioned him to do the scenario and décor for an American ballet. To provide the music, Gerald suggested Porter, who was an old friend of his from the Yale Glee Club. Porter’s alimony-rich wife, Linda, was opposed to the idea. She wanted Cole to become a serious composer, and had even tried to hire Stravinsky to effect this transformation. No way. Porter was determined to be a success on Broadway, and he accepted de Maré’s commission. The theme of the ballet, called Within the Quota, was the impact of America—jazz, the Wild West, Hollywood—on a Swedish immigrant who ends up a movie star. Porter’s score would parody the music played in silent-movie theaters. Gerald’s backdrop—an eye-catching collage of screaming headlines such as unknown banker buys atlantic—would impress Picasso when he and Olga accompanied the Murphys to the opening night.

In Venice, Linda Porter’s addiction to what Gerald called “sheer society” imposed a considerable strain on her guests, as did her well-founded fear that Gerald, like so many of their friends, might be as gay as her husband. Furthermore, Linda did not take to Sara, who returned alone to Antibes after two weeks of incessant partying, happy to be back with her daughter and two young sons. It is at this juncture, while Gerald was away, that Picasso is said by William Rubin, the former director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, to have fallen passionately in love with Sara and to have had “a kind of pagan ‘Mystic Marriage’” with her, “a harbinger of fecundity and child-rearing.” Sara supposedly succumbed and then drew back. The supposedly heartbroken Picasso then proceeded to paint over a huge, classical composition allegorizing Sara, which he had supposedly lugged down from Paris, and replace it with his masterpiece The Pipes of Pan.

At first I thought Rubin had a point, but investigation proved him wrong. For one thing, the painting never left Paris. None of Picasso’s friends turned out to have suggested such a romance, because he was known to be averse to affairs with women who had given birth. He preferred playing Adam to unencumbered Eves. Also, since his wife was maniacally jealous, he would have been especially wary of an involvement with someone who had become a close friend of them both. Lastly, Sara adored her adoring, albeit homosexual, husband and was famously faithful to him. The irony is that when Picasso repainted The Pipes of Pan back in Paris he had Gerald in mind, not Sara. The artist, who was at the height of his classical period, wanted to play off new-world confusion, as personified by Gerald, against the sacred fire of the ancient world, as personified by the Dionysiac pipes player. Picasso also wanted to hint at sexual ambiguity. And where better than at Antipolis, as the Greeks once called Antibes?

In the summer of 1924, the Murphy and Picasso families traveled south together by rail. When they got off the train at Marseille to stretch their legs, Picasso said, “Let’s stay here.” In her memoir, the Murphys’ daughter says the Picassos spent the summer there. In fact, after a night or two they traveled on to the Hôtel du Cap.

Since by then virtually all the Riviera’s hotels stayed open in the summer, the younger set was abandoning such northern resorts as Deauville and Le Touquet for Antibes and Juan-les-Pins. Among the friends who had followed the Murphys’ example were the Stravinskys. They had taken a house at Nice, but since all four of their children had diphtheria, the Murphys and Picassos stayed away from them. The Beaumonts, who had promised to join them at the Hôtel du Cap, had chosen Cannes instead, but they came over for beach parties. Diaghilev, his boyfriends, and his ballet company were at Monte Carlo. Cocteau was to be avoided—he had taken a villa at a neighboring naval base, where he played host to sailors and druggy friends.

Once again, the Murphys made the Hôtel du Cap their headquarters, while they set about rebuilding the small, tumbledown “chalet” near La Garoupe that they had acquired the year before. Meanwhile, Picasso, who had been too distracted to work the previous summer, had taken an imposing villa with a large garage, which he used as a studio. Many American friends from previous summers had returned. Picasso was particularly happy to see the writers John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and Gilbert Seldes and their wives, as well as Donald Ogden Stewart. Future guests would include the Ernest Hemingways, the Philip Barrys, the Robert Benchleys, and Dorothy Parker. (Benchley and Parker were both writers for Vanity Fair.) Brilliant company, but, as Picasso later told me, he began to tire of them en masse—too rowdy, no common language, too many cocktails. If he continued to frequent the Murphys, it was because Sara was so unlike his own wife, in her serenity, warmth, and easygoing American charm and humor, and because Gerald was such an anomaly.

The Scott Fitzgeralds were a recurrent problem. They had rented a villa, but spent much of their time at the Hôtel du Cap. Zelda was in a bad way. An affair with a young pilot at a local air base was the cause. Alcohol fed the flames. To sober up, Zelda would go to Eden Roc, slip out of her evening dress, and dive 35 feet into the darkness of the sea from the rocks above. Bella figura obliged Scott to follow suit, but he hated it. One night Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills. As Sara administered an olive-oil emetic, Zelda recoiled, saying, “Don’t make me drink that, please. If you drink too much oil you’ll turn into a Jew.”

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald had become fascinated by Sara and did his best to draw her out. She would be appalled 10 years later, when Tender Is the Night came out, to discover the motive for his interrogations. Fitzgerald had cast the Murphys in his and Zelda’s image. To be perceived as spoiled expatriates at the nadir of the Depression would be a source of sorrow for Sara—retribution, perhaps, for having lived too well. “You can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella” was the *Daily Worker’*s take on this great novel.

In the course of 1924 and 1925, Gerald would enhance the grounds and enlarge and remodel the chalet, which had outbuildings (including a donkey stable, which became a studio), a small farm, and an idyllic terraced garden, which the former owner—a colonial official—had planted with exotic trees and shrubs. They would call it the Villa America.

By the summer of 1925, Sara and Gerald had finished the job and were ready to welcome a constant flood of guests. The décor was 1920s minimal: black tiled floors, white walls, black satin sofas, stainless-steel furniture, as well as café chairs and tables that had been silvered. Picasso was too immersed in his work to see much of the Murphys, but he shared Gerald’s taste for ragtime and would frequently borrow his records—Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong—or watch Zelda do a solitary, self-absorbed dance to them. Gerald was supposedly irritated because some of the records were not returned, but I suspect the real reason was more painful: he had recognized himself in The Pipes of Pan.

There was a large staff at the Villa America: a cook, a maid or two, a nanny, a chauffeur, a farmer (the Murphys had their own cows and chickens), and a young cousin of Diaghilev’s who served variously as a studio assistant, tutor, court jester, chef, and skipper of Gerald’s boats. There were guest cottages, one of which, La Ferme des Orangers, was renamed “La Ferme Dérangée” by Robert Benchley. John Dos Passos complained that the Villa America was too much. “Fond as I was of [the Murphys],” he wrote, “I could stand it for about four days. It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to earth.”

By 1930 the phrase “Living well is the best revenge” would cease to apply to the Murphys’ existence. Losses on the stock market curtailed their lifestyle. They put the Villa America up for rent and spent more time in the States. Gerald had to take over Mark Cross, the family business. Then tragedy struck: their adored sons both died in their teens—Baoth in 1935 and Patrick in 1937. Although the Murphys increasingly withdrew from social life, they continued to support liberal causes and kept up with old friends. After retiring to a pre-Revolutionary house in Snedens Landing, on the banks of the Hudson, they ended up in a small cottage in East Hampton, on what was left of Francis Wiborg’s formerly vast domain. There Gerald died in 1964, and Sara in 1975—60 years after their marriage.

On the occasion of Patrick’s death, Fitzgerald had evoked Henry James in his letter of condolence: “The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden.” If the bowl had indeed been golden, it would surely not have broken.